Mona Simpson is the bestselling author of seven novels including Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook and, most recently, Commitment.

Mona studied poetry at Berkley. She got her MFA from Columbia. During grad school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years. She also teaches at UCLA. She knows the industry from several angles and has worked in it for decades.

She joins Marrie Stone to talk about Commitment and writing multiple point-of-view novels. They talk about maintaining momentum in a novel’s middle, bringing bygone eras back to life, breathing life into your characters, playing the role of psychologist as writer, the role of research and much more.

In many ways, Commitment might be considered a “what-if” novel. Some aspects bear resemblance to Mona’s life and other aspects are very different. Mona and Marrie also discuss the generative idea of “what-if” novels, how writing one novel sometimes begets another, and other ways to generate ideas for your fiction.

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(Recorded on February 9, 2024) 

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)